Helping trans and queer youth for the next 1253 days (ish)
Refresher about me and my work: I work in higher ed as essentially a social worker for our on-campus students. Many of the students I support are trans, non-binary, and queer. They often come to me or are directed to me because I'm visibly queer, and use she/they pronouns. A recent survey* listed about 30% of our campus populations as queer (ace-inclusive, not mentioning gender identity), the same survey demonstrated nearly double the risk of suicide, mental health crisis, etc among our trans and gender non-conforming students. This survey was from before the 2024 election.
My point with this post is asking y'all for any suggestions in supporting my trans youth in particular and queer youth in general during this time of increasing demonization and as the feds have started to pressure schools to remove protections for trans women specifically.**
What things would you have wanted to hear from adults around you? What things helped you continue to feel safe with trusted adults? When the conversations keep getting tougher - talking about staying in or returning to the closet for safety or surviving that necessity when at home, or whatever fresh political hell hits next? When your roommate's mom compares her daughter living with you to sexual violence?
I have a lot of experience with tough questions, and dealt some of these. I've talked about how you have to take care of yourself and water your plants or you have dead plants and fascism. But my experiences coming out in grad school and figuring out my demi-gender-ness much later aren't the same as these kids' life experiences. And I always want to make sure I'm doing better. What helped you? What would you have wanted to hear? What message would you want to pass to them?
Feel free to DM if preferred for safety or privacy
*I can't say how representative this was but between 4 and 5 percent of the population took the survey so unless that was particularly skewed in some way that should be a decent sample.
** There's a chance my speech will be restricted as an employee, we'll see, but that's an area I can fight more effectively.
The Trevor Project put out a study in 2019 that showed that having even one trusted adult reduced suicide attempts for LGBTQ youth by 40%.
There's a pessimistic reading of this that says that it's horrifying that so many queer kids don't have ANY trusted adults (and it is), but I choose to think about it the other way: being a trusted adult is one of the most powerful things you can do. If there were any other intervention we knew of that reduced suicide rates by 40%, we'd see it as this absolutely incredible breakthrough with unparalleled effectiveness.
So, this might sound like a bit of a copout answer, but I mean it wholeheartedly: you are already doing the most important thing. The fact that they are coming to you with such difficult questions and sharing their burdens shows that they're turning to you for support. The simple fact that they can turn to someone like you is probably more significant than you saying the exact right things.
Also, I think it's important to remind yourself that, in your role, you're always going to be faced with an asymmetry that can hide a lot of your impact. Closeted people aren't necessarily going to let you know that they see you as a role model; some students will never have the opportunity to tell you how much you meant to them; others won't realize the gravity of your personal impact until years later once they have the maturity and self-reflection to look back. One of my queer mentors in college was an absolutely incredible person, but I never got to tell him that or how much he meant to me because I was too busy dealing with myself and all my concomitant difficulties at the time.
So, keep doing what you're doing, Fae. Care and kindness are genuinely lifesaving. It's less about what you do and more that you're doing it in the first place.
I'm in a bit of a different role as a teacher to a younger set of kids, but my two guiding principles are Visiblity and Stability. I want kids to know that queer people like me exist, and I also try to be a rock solid anchor for them within the turbulence of youth. Does that mean I myself am always rock solid? Not at all! But I want them to know that stability is possible, and its accessible even when it can feel difficult to get there.
Furthermore, in a culture that is increasingly teaching them to be highly reactive to everything, I try to get them to see that accessing stability, especially when it is hard to do so, is transformative. If the boat is rocking drastically under heavy waves, that means you have to fight harder to stay on it. Is it fair that your boat is rocking so hard in the first place when other people have much smoother sailing? Of course not, but that doesn't make the fight to stay on not worth it.
The other thing I'll throw out, and this is something that you might be able to share with some of them directly: overcoming hardship is its own sort of superpower. It's not widely seen as one, and it's not something that gets you a lot of credit, especially when the battle is a personal one, but I don't think its lack of external acknowledgement reduces its significance.
The hard part about resilience is that, because it's not externally validated, we don't always see it in ourselves. Helping someone to understand their own resilience can help them realize their own strength at a time when they feel particularly weak and powerless. So, when someone is sharing their difficulties with you, and it's something neither you or they can change, you can reflect back to them the strength it takes to continue to press forward under those conditions. Very few people look in the mirror and see their own strength in the reflection, so it often takes an outsider to be a different kind of mirror for them.
I'll leave you with one final thing: the sentence "I'm glad you're here."
I use this frequently. It's the easiest way to let people know they mean something to someone else. And knowing that you mean something to someone else is a guard against depression, nihilism, and worse. Use it frequently and earnestly.
I have no advice to offer but want to thank you for fighting the good fight and doing so in a thoughtful way.
I've been thinking about this for a bit and the only thing that comes to mind is teach these kids to organise.
Stuff like affinity groups (also for support not only action), underground railroads (and not only for hormones), mutual aid and basic security.
Also try to find the previous generations of trans, queer, antirasists, feminists, etc in your area and their spots. Those are good starting points to learn.
I'm just thinking that if your existence is a basis for repression, you have to see yourself as a political activist and act accordingly.
And remember the words of Emma Goldman:
(Feel free to swap out "dance" for anything that gives you joy or helps restore your strength)
And, obviously, as you yourself already know, one facet can be to not be open with everyone about everything all the time. I'm not saying "tell them to go into hiding" more like teach them to evaluate situations with this lense too (just as bipoc or afab do all the time already).
It is not quite the same, yet when I was being bullied the adults I remember the most are the ones who were just... There. And saw me. Not even having a deeper conversation, but just seeing me. Talking about small things in a normal way. A biology teacher of mine in particular I just talked to about Biology actually helped me the most.
Because those were the moments I was just... sane? Like I had a place to be. Even if they were nothing more than 5, 10 minutes conversations.
You most likely already know that. And I know it also bears repeating. Because no matter how well you are an active listener, can assess risk, support during grief or being the one to handle crisis's, so often is it the smaller points of light that matter the most.
Regardless of the attempts of power or hatred, we queer folk are nonetheless going to exist, and have existed, and continue to exist. I try to keep that in mind whenever I get a bit hopeless.
I won't have the easiest time answering what you're asking for, since I was fully out and legally transitioned before I started college. Sorry!
High school me, however, had an awful time! One of the few things that kept me around was meeting a teacher who wanted to see me happy. Genuinely meant the world to me that there was someone there who was on my side, who cared about who I was, and would listen when I told her about the unfun parts of being queer.
I think that aside from that, I really needed to hear from somebody that part of being trans is that life gets better as you get older and have more command over your environment. School sucks and it sucks doubly when your body fits wrong and your peers could all potentially be hostile. Not having someone older and wiser and also queer around meant I kind of had to just figure that part out on my own.
I've got students in that situation too!
Thanks so much for sharing. I try to be that person who wants my students to be happy while letting them feel whatever ups and downs they're feeling and just validating that.
We have a mentorship program here with our queer faculty/staff and queer undergrad students for this reason too! And we show up at our sporting events. I had someone who was definitely not in the mascot costume write me a letter thanking me for showing up to the lgbtq night and tabling our faculty/staff org. It mattered that much that we were there and I kept that letter to remind me of how much it matters to show up.
I appreciate this thread, although I can't contribute much beyond that. I'm in a pretty red, rural area, where I just moved into a new home. I'd been thinking about flying a US flag for a while, then the election happened and, well.
But these days I'm back to thinking about flying the US flag alongside some kind of flag to let targeted groups know that they're welcome in my home. I'm mostly thinking about friends of my kids as they get older and (I anticipate) meet kids who don't have a safe space at home to explore their identity.
All of this is to say that I'm not in any kind of position like yours, but equally interested in knowing what kind of things I can do (beyond flags and bumper stickers) to be a role model, a safe listener, and general ally.
Wishing you and them well.